Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology features a new center for students, an effort to improve the quality of student life after a graduate student committed suicide three years ago.

Three years after the suicide of a graduate student rocked the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, a new department center, intended to serve as a place for chemistry students and faculty to gather and relax, opened last month in Mallinckrodt, the main chemistry building.

The latest in the department’s efforts to improve the quality of student life, the center has opened to rave reviews.

“To the best of my knowledge...[it is] the best graduate center in the country,” says Timothy J. Dransfield, a seventh-year graduate student and a former co-chair of the department’s quality of life committee.

Over the last few years, the department’s efforts to reach out to its members, students say, have met with a great deal of success.

“My quality of life has been pretty good, more often than not,” says Tiffany K.M. Gierasch, current co-chair of the quality of life committee. “My sense is that most people are happy.”

A Checkered Past

Chemistry students say their life can be difficult and lonely.

“Grad school can be very isolating, especially in the sciences,” Dransfield says.

Graduate students work long hours in a research group headed by a professor for most of their career in the doctoral program. Most students work straight through the summer without taking significant vacations.

Students say they often toil away for many months on a single experiment and are under pressure to produce results.

This pressure reached critical proportions after Jason D. Altom, a fifth-year graduate student, committed suicide by swallowing a lethal dose of potassium cyanide in August 1998.

In his suicide note, Altom blasted the department for not caring enough about its students.

“Professors here have too much power over the lives of their grad students,” he wrote.

His death sparked national attention when the New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled, “Lethal Chemistry at Harvard.”

In the wake of Altom’s death, and the resulting negative media attention, the department changed the thesis advising system to involve three professors instead of one.